‘Chak De India’ celebrates the underdog
With Chak De India, Yashraj Films is going beyond their formula of designer films. No love-story, no romantic songs, no chiffon-sari clad leading ladies, and add to that Shahrukh Khan sporting a scruffy beard.
Yashraj Films is clearly treading new ground with their new film “Chak De India” which comes close on the heels of their formulaic films, the lukewarm “Tara Rum Pum” and the washout “Jhoom Barabar Jhoom”. A sports film essentially, “Chak De India” is an underdog’s story, but one that the filmmakers say has many firsts to its credit.
Director, Chak De India, Shimit Amin told in an interview, “It is essentially underdogs becoming heroes. But there are so many layers. Hockey has neveer been filmed ever in the world and seeing that it’s India’s national sport, it was quite a challenge to put it on film.”
Writer, Jaideep Shahni adds, “If you have sports as a career, you are an underdog once, then if you are a hockey player or anything other than cricket, then you are an underdog twice over and if you are a girl playing hockey, then you are an underdog three times over.”
After Salman Khan turned down one of the the film’s most pivotal roles, Yashraj regular Shahrukh Khan was roped in to play Kabir Khan, the coach who takes up the challenge of training the national women’s hockey team. But that wasn’t the toughest bit of casting for the filmmakers. It was the job of finding hockey players who could act, or then actors who could play hockey that proved to be their toughest challenge.
Amin says, “I realised that the task at hand was really big becuase if I had a cricket film I would have been able to pick (people) easily and can do it a day.”
Shahni explains, “The girls were put in a camp, where for many months, they would play hockey from 4:30 to 2, and after lunch till evening. They would then have acting classes and after that till late, they would have their dialect training.”
So, it’s all real hockey being played by the actors in the film. No special effects, no duplicates, only the real thing. Of course it took some 1,500 cans of raw stock to shoot good and bad takes, of which only the best takes were used in the film. Now considering any regular film is shot using about 400 cans of film stock, it’s a record of sorts that the “Chak De India” team seems to have created..
Hopefully this record, is just one of many they’ll create with this film!
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